Burger King spiked my co-worker’s fries with a mind-altering substance

We ran out of sliced turkey … and being the financially sensible (read: broke) person that I am, I decided that, rather than eat out, I would bring to work a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

Lunchtime arrived. I was weak. Faint. Famished. I ate the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. It was, shall we say, less than satisfying.

I was fucking starving. To death, even. Death was imminent.

My co-worker, meanwhile, opted for Burger King … a place from which I had not eaten a single morsel in more than 10 years.

It was 2002 when last I visited the kingdom of burgers. During a pit stop at a rest area in New Jersey, delirious from hunger, I somehow succumbed to the vile call of a bacon double cheeseburger, fries and a chocolate shake. Halfway through that psychotic episode, my hunger-suppressed ability to feel revulsion finally kicked in and I tossed the remainder of my “meal” in the trash while simultaneously using the Jedi mind trick on my wife.

“You shall tell no one what you just saw.”

“I shall tell no one what I just saw.”

“This is not the meal I was looking for.”

“This is not the meal you were looking for.”

And so, aside from that one regrettable episode, I have been fast-food-burger-joint-free for roughly two decades.

Which is why I’m convinced that what happened the other day had to involve my unwitting consumption of a hallucinogenic drug.

It must have been on the fries. They smelled so good … and amplified to an unimaginable degree the inadequacy of the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich that was taking up an infinitesimally small part of my still-growling stomach.

Then it happened. My friend offered me a fry. I ate it … and lost my fucking mind.

The rest is a blur. Someone — surely not me — took my car through the Burger King drive-through. I saw a hand reaching out to pay the headset-wearing merchant of death. It looked like my hand. But it couldn’t be … because that same hand was then holding a bag containing Burger King “food.” What madness is this??

Before I knew it, the contents of that bag had found their way into my stomach, and I spent the rest of the day burping and hiccuping and half hoping that the whole fucking mess would come gushing back out of my mouth like a disgusting geyser of fat and grease and “beef” and space-age preservatives that could keep an uneaten Burger King burger in mint condition until long after the sun burns out.

I have the same kind of relationship with Whataburger. I mean once in a while, I’ll just get this all consuming craving and I’ll go and eat. But I never leave Whataburger saying “What a burger” as the commercials suggest. Instead I leave with self loathing and regret. I’m not proud.Smokeynall´s most recent blog post: HEY!! BLOW ME!!! A KISS!!

In the callow days of my youth, I could, and regularly did, eat 10-12 Krystal “hamburgers” at one setting. There wasn’t any nobility or sense of achievement since the 15-year-old digestive system is impervious to nearly everything in both quality and quantity.

Somehow, in the intervening decades, my GI system became sentient and began actively rejecting Krystals, and with so much pain and drama and unpredictability that I no longer risk them. This is a shame in a way because the damn things still smell so good.

When we drove cross country from MA to TX, we had to often partake of such things as a Burger King breakfast. I too, had been almost 15 years distant from partaking of that gaping maw of a grease pit. Sounds like you are good for another 20?

You know that is why they vent the fryers the way that they do? To get people with the smell of “fresh fries”…. and then sell them a burger at the same time.
The problem with your PBJ was not that it wasn’t inherently healthy and satisfying – you just needed a banana and a granola bar to go with it… or french fries.

It isn’t your fault; there was a whole segment on 60 Minutes about chemists (called flavorists) figuring out how to make food, food that’s really REALLY bad for you, addictive. They taste-test and add or subtract chemicals until they have a winner. So, totally not your fault, crap food really is designed to be freakishly addictive, by people with PhDs. CBS News online still has the segment up: